By Karen Ocamb
August 26, 2015 :: 10:28 AM
The national activist group Black Lives Matter held a national call to action Tuesday to draw attention to the epidemic of murder targeting transgender women, most of whom are Black or Latino. Other than MSNBC, Fusion and the Huffington Post, most mainstream media has ignored the reported killings of 20 trans women since January—but the anger over invisibility is gaining momentum. On Thursday, SAID – Stonewalling Accurate & Inclusive Depictions, is sponsoring an “education rally” challenging the accuracy of the new film “Stonewall,” which activists believe misrepresents the role trans women of color played in that galvanizing moment in LGBT history.
On its website, SAID posts this reason for the rally:
Director/producer Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz, both white gay men, have crafted such an inaccurate depiction of the 1969 Rebellion against police brutality and transphobia that it supersedes what both men excuse as mere “fiction” to what scholars and credible sources deem as historical revisionism due to the film’s whitewashing, trans-erasure and gay-washing. Furthermore, transsexual feminists have condemned Emmerich’s ‘Hollywood trans-face casting’, a commonly used term for the stigmatizing and humiliating industry practice of non-trans directors hiring male actors to play trans* woman roles. This miscasting only reinforces institutionalized misgendering, which is a form of trans-misogynistic gender mockery.
“This [mis]depiction gravely dishonors our Black and Latina trans* woman ancestors by gay-washing/revising history, or as Stonewall veteran Miss Major described in a previous statement to the Advocate, ‘The ongoing whitewashing of those days of struggle put a blemish on the memory of those trans women of color and those still living — mentally, physically and spiritually.’ I agree with her: Whitewashing trans* history IS an act of violence,” says trans writer and advocate Ashley Love on her Facebook page.
Trans people have also had to deal with the recent misrepresentations in the once venerable New York Times. Media Matters reports:
When you hear of a media outlet peddling debunked and misleading research in order to argue against providing transgender people with important medical care, you probably don’t think of The New York Times.
But that’s exactly what happened in the August 23 Sunday edition of the paper. In an op-ed titled, “How Changeable Is Gender?” Richard Friedman, a Times contributing opinion writer and professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, grossly misrepresented empirical research in order to raise doubts about gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender people, including transgender youth.
Media Matters notes that the op-ed was quickly debunked—which is what SAID hopes to do on Thursday, from 6:00p-8:00pm outside Warner Bros. Studios (3400 W. Riverside Dr. Burbank, 91505) where professors and historians will comment on the movie “Stonewall.”
It should be noted, however, that the movie has not yet been distributed and much of the reaction to the alleged “whitewashing” of LGBT history seems based primarily on the promotional trailer for the fictional film, which features a young white protagonist.
Longtime LGBT activist and entertainment commentator Jim Fouratt, who was at the Stonewall Inn the night of the riots and subsequently co-founded the Gay Activists Alliance, says of the reaction on his Facebook page (misspellings and all):
Makes me sad as someone who was actually and verifiably was present the misrepresentations by authors David Carter “Stonewall Riots” of who was there and what happened and Martin Duberman‘s seminal “STONEWALL” where he took as fact the confabulations of one subject (I was another of the six profiled) and did not verify the veracity of the subject our of his desire to be politically correct. … And the twisting of trans Activist to invent a scenario that did not take place. The few photographs of the first night show both the mood and who was present. The claims that Sylvia Rivera And Storme were present with Sylvia throwing the first brick ( no bricks or rocks or stones on Christoprler Street.) Or Storme beating up a cop are simply not true
Neither were present ..and people willingness to support this false narrative leads us to today.
But while LGBT history might be in dispute—there is no argument over the murders of trans women and the lack of visibility brought to the epidemic. This, too, is historic and matters. Perhaps a protest at Warner Brothers might prompt some attention.
Photo above by Leticia Macias from Aug. 18 #TransLivesMatter protest in Boyle Heights.